Well, everyone, with only a few days left before graduation, I have been getting creative with some new photos I took and the free trial of Photoshop CS 5.1 I recently downloaded. Here are a few of them for your viewing pleasure!

This is a dandelion! The colors were not added, simply enhanced. Who knew these white fluffies were actually opalescent and colorful?

This is a closeup of a necklace I made, I edited the colors to bring out the copper-colored lutz charm. :)

Rum and strawberries with background colors removed, then enhanced VERY slightly! Daquiris!

These are the before (bottom) and after (top) photos I dedicated to Maurice Sendak, author and illustrator of "Where the Wild Things Are" and other beloved children's stories. Sendak passed away on Tuesday morning at the age of 83, and the Wild Things are in mourning. Wild Things inspired my childhood imagination, and I hope it will ignite the wild rumpus in the minds of my future children. He'll always be remembered as the true king of all the wild things in my mind.

This will be my final post for Web Design. I bid you all a fond farewell as I graduate and move on to other things. It's been real, guys.

Illustrator Creation #2: 3-Dimensional Text

I played around with this one for a long time! I had a hard time making it look the way I wanted it to, but finally, after many references to the tutorial, and lots of adjusting the 3D grid, I finally got it to look like actual 3D! I'm pretty excited about this one, but I think I still like my guitar better! :P

Illustrator Creation #1, Simple drawing. I spent a lot of time experimenting with brushes, and I came across one that I liked, the artistic ink brush. I was just sketching a little, and wiggly lines became a rough guitar. I added minimal shading and a little writing. This was simple to do, but I kind of like the way it turned out!

Design Articles

From the website given to us, I LOVED the minimalist movie posters, because I am always really struck by minimalist art in general. As an advertiser, I have spent the past years learning to say as much as possible, to as many people as possible, with as few words as possible, and I think that minimalist art is often the best way to accomplish that. The way artists are able to incorporate so many elements of a story plot into a simple picture on a solid background with so little detail, gets their message across at a glance, and I strive every day to be able to communicate so effectively to people through creative design. http://www.webdesignbooth.com/minimalist-movie-posters/

The second article I really liked was the amazing print ad article! I'm seeing a rise in digital everything, and even though I think that print advertising, as well as print media in general, is slowly starting to phase out of our society, I still really love magazine ads. I always have. They hit me the same way the minimalist posters did, and the work of Olly Moss does, quick, big, straight to the point. They offer visual stimulation, a product, and a little quip that's just relevant enough to fill in your own narrative. They encourage imagination, they're often funny, and they sometimes require a little thought. I think that the most effective way to sell something to somebody, is to let them put something together in their head, laugh about it, have a revelation, and feel smart. Making consumers use their own mind to construct the narrative behind a print ad, is much like performing "Inception", making the reader feel that investing in the product was not only fun, but their idea.
http://www.kitaro10.com/inspiration/30-new-amazing-print-media-advertisement/

Completed Art Poster

My art poster is finally finished. As you may remember, it was inspired by the minimalistic but deep work of Olly Moss. Visual art constructed from scratch is not my forte, but I was able to capture a little hint of Olly Moss's superimposition-like design in making one plot-specific object merge with another by making the main character's wristwatch coincide with the core of the granny smith apple. I also took a little inspiration from one of the original film posters in which a period at the end of a sentence falls toward Will Ferrell's head, but I made it into the dot of the first "i" in fiction, and decided in the interest of minimalism, not to use a photo of Ferrell's character. I decided that the apple should be the only photorealistic element in the poster in an effort to keep it simple.

My poster does not look exactly like the work of my inspirational artist, but that's to be expected when working with different media while trying to keep a little originality, and overall I'm very happy with it.

Photoshop Color Manipulations

This is my photoshop color manipulation photo. The image on top is the original color image, which was converted to greyscale and then back to RGB Color so that I could use the history brush tool to bring blue
back into her eyes. I then added more blue to her eyes with simple brush tool paint, and then a very low opacity blue tint to her pearls. I then used a very low opacity pink to bring soft color to her cheeks, and a little to her nose and bottom lip.

Art Posters

The artist that I would like to emulate in my art poster is an artist called Olly Moss. He is not particularly well-known, but his Star Wars Trilogy poster reimaginings are recognized web-wide. I think that these posters, as well as his other, primarily minimalist, works are very creative and really cater to true fans who have high familiarity with the content of what he is representing.

The Obama Administration and the Cry for Mobile and Digital Privacy

This post would be an excellent follow-up to my social media post about facebook and other networking sites. It seems that the Obama administration is seeking to crack down on the invasion of citizens' consumer privacy, proposing a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, that would provide restrictions on the availability of your personal information, as well as a code of conduct for what may be done with that information. If I'm completely honest, I am torn on this issueeiiII KNOW. WAIT. wait wait. Hear me out.

While I agree that the idea of your ISP and your Phone company tracking your locations via your smartphone without your permission is, at the very least, strange. And the information handed over to marketers and advertisers about your habits and lifestyle gives them the upper hand at manipulating you into buying their products and services.

But.

In my experience, most of the people who complain about their privacy rights being infringed upon are the people who make their "privacy" as public as they possibly can. Say you have a smart phone, you know, one of those tiny pocket computers the kids have now so they can play the Grumpy Pigeons game while they're on the toilet. If you use it for social networking, they track your tweets and status updates by location, and if you happen to use foursquare...forget about it. While you're staging a coup, trying to finally oust that smug jerk in the cubicle across from yours as Mayor of the 12th floor Mens' room, you're willingly handing out your location at every second to LITERALLY ANYONE with an internet connection who wanted to bother finding it. You have no legal expectation of privacy, so it cannot be invaded. It's like going around taping copies of your social security card to payphones in a subway station and then trying to say that somebody stole your identity. They didn't. You taped your identity up in a public place and left it alone, any reasonable person would expect it to have immediately disappeared, used to open a credit card in your name, and charges for a Ferrari to show up on your accounts within the next 36 hours, but it seems that reason goes out the window when the information translates from tangible to digital. People seem to assume that just because they are using their own digital device, that there is some cloak of anonymity to protect them from being the target of a Ruby Tuesday's ad, while they use their iPhone to post a low-contrast vintage photo of their Ruby Tuesday's Burger to instagram, and tweet it to their coworkers, tag the restaurant location, and all of the people at the table. ON THE INTERNET. These are the people who seem to believe that just because they are using the internet on their phone, that the information they enter will never really leave their hand.

I also feel that I must say, as a future marketing and advertising professional, I relish the thought of being able to conveniently screen peoples' habits to more easily sell them stuff they want. This sounds underhanded and sneaky, but really, it's been going on for years. Do you have store discount or rewards cards? You know, CVS extra care, Kmart Rewards, etc. These cards save you money, and they're free! Why, that's just the most altruistic...wha...what's that? You say they're not only a ploy to get you to become a loyal customer to that establishment, but also to subsequently provide data on your purchases, so the store and advertisers will have an easily quantifiable record of your buying habits so that they can crank up the prices or offer you store-specific coupons for the products you can't seem to live without? Ah. There it is. I know many people who complained endlessly when Verizon began making their customers' smart phone locations available to marketers looking to analyze commutes, routines, and all that, saying that their contract was breached and they couldn't wait to switch to AT&T. Not surprisingly, though, these same people were the ones who had a keyring that looked like a cheerleader's Pom-Pom it was so loaded up with a gas, grocery, pharmacy, bookstore, and even retail department store rewards cards for every establishment within ten miles of every place they had ever been, all hiding exactly TWO keys. These are the people who call to mind the recent story about the teenage girl who shopped regularly at Target, and just by noticing a small change, a sudden preference for unscented lotion over ones with fragrance in her usually consistent buying habits, Target realized that she was pregnant and somewhere in her second trimester where the sense of smell becomes heightened. So, knowing this, they began mailing coupons for diapers and cribs to her. At her parents house. Who had no idea she was pregnant. Outing the young expectant mother, who had no idea her purchases were being tracked and analyzed.

I may be biased in my experience, and limited in interaction with people who find digital and mobile privacy to be of dire importance. However, the way I see it, you are NOT paranoid. Your information IS everywhere. Everyone IS using it to manipulate you. But, it's also making life more convenient for you. Folks may find it creepy when the exact same rice-cooker they were just scoping out on Overstock.com pops up in an Amazon ad on the sidebar of their facebook page, in the color they wanted that Overstock didn't have, for $12 less. I see that and say "That's amazing, I gave amazon my personal information when I bought that 18-box pallet of Count Chocula, and now they're using it to try and sell me that rice cooker THAT I WAS TOTALLY GOING TO BUY ANYWAY. JACKPOT." Sure it's a little frightening to think of major corporations recording your every digital move and using that information for profit. But you know what scares me more? The thought of these major corporations having to hand over all that information to the Government. At least I know why Amazon.com wants to know where I tend to be from noon to 3:30pm every day. I don't care to think what the Government might want with singular access to that information, but it's probably not to try and convince me to buy the top three items on my wishlist.

Ezine Post! These are a bit out of order it seems!

Alright, well, right now it looks terrible. I know this. However, this is the basic layout idea. Romancing the Stove will be an E-Zine about cooking and baking, featuring mostly cakes, cupcakes, and pastries, recipes, baking and cooking blogs, forums, news, and other exciting features. I want it to have a sort of romantic, vintage look. I want lots of texture, muted colors and floral patterns. The page displayed here is the "Recipe" page that would come up as a long list if the "recipe" button is clicked, or if the Cameo Symbol is clicked, it would bring up the "Recipe of the Month". It includes a photo, description, title, and the actual recipe of course. Many pages would be laid out in much the same way.

Like I said before, this is hard to look at. It's very busy, the colors are too intense, and it isn't how I want it yet, but it gives the general idea of what design features might go into different pages. Think of this as a sort of "swatch" page for the rest of the site, and try not to strain your eyes.

Interesting sidenote: My blog posts are being posted WAY out of order from which they were assigned. But they will all be here eventually! Hopefully that isn't too frustrating, but apologies to my professor and classmates who have to read them.

Design Blog 2: Steepster, The Communi-Tea

http://steepster.com/teas

I'm not entirely sure that anyone will be able to view the site in its entirety without creating an account or logging in with facebook, but I think that Steepster is a very well-designed community site. It adheres to the classical design principles, introduces some new ones, and is VERY user-friendly.

Apologies to followers and professor, I thought I hit post on this last week, but I guess I just saved it as a draft! Late post notice, but better late than never! Right?

Week 1 of Design Blog: New Internet Policies and International Blog Censorship

The internet has been under fire from all directions recently, with the rise of SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, and other proposed legislation in the U.S. and Canada, it's no surprise that countries under less democratic rule are having their free cyberspeech threatened tenfold. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, bloggers in Vietnam are being detained for speaking out against their government or criticisms of the communist regime. Google has been compliant with these laws, instated under the guise of national security, by creating a location-specific availability filter that uses IP addresses to register locations. It provides a way to circumvent this filter by using a non-country-specific URL. Also, China has been shutting down Tibetan blogs without explanation, after decades of tension between the minority group and the Chinese government.

The censorship of the internet and the prosecution of those using it, while unsurprising, is wrong. The internet has lost it's element of total anonymity, and now postings are quite easily traced back to unique IP addresses and individuals. This makes blogging much riskier for those with dissenting opinions posting in environments with strict speech regulations. As Americans, we sometimes forget, that though our liberties are occasionally lessened for the sake of "national security", we are still relatively free to openly criticize and oppose our governmental processes and leaders. In other countries without protection of free speech, harsher punishments await those who suggest dissent in a public forum. Google, whom I would have expected to absolutely oppose these censorship laws, has enabled this policy that complies with them, though they offer a way around the filters, "NCR" URLs may not be made readily known to everyone. The fact that this policy was released quietly, hidden under the outcry over Twitter's new censorship policy, doesn't make it any less oppressive.

The implications of these policies are unclear for now, but a future may still come when such standards could be applied to us here in the United States. There can always be found some loophole or adjustment to be made that will allow these impositions by the way of "protection" and "national security". SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA, are only the beginning, in my opinion. These and other short-sighted legislations could easily be passed and our liberties would be just as limited as those affected by China and Vietnam's new censorship policies, especially since Google already seems to be on board.

What are the implications? Where will free speech on the internet be in five years? Ten? What can we do to make sure the "World Wide Web" remains just that? With Iran throwing the Kill switch, China and Vietnam detaining and shutting down bloggers for their opinions, and the United States and Canadian Governments working to take down Piracy without analysis, where do we draw the line between liberty and security? Food for thought.

This Begins a New Chapter in Connois-saurus Blog History

Hello, all! This semester, I am taking a web design course; and from this post on, until the end of the semester my posts will be about the wonderful world of web design! Thanks to all three of my current followers for being patient with me!

Social Networking and Its Effect on Meatspace. What's changed?

Okay, so. Today I want to talk about social media and networking. However, I want to focus less on the marketing and advertising aspects of it, and more on how it has evolved into a legitimate medium. With the recent introduction of Google's new social networking faction, Google+, and its unique features, other social networking sites have been endeavoring to keep up and compete. G+ introduces new features, namely the concept of "circles" which allows you to specify certain groups of friends, acquaintances, family, coworkers, etc.; and choose which groups get to see what you've posted (which Facebook has recently adopted). It also borrows features from other networking sites like Twitter's "status-only" form of posting, it's less direct and there is no "wall" feature like that of Facebook, although it does allow you to "tag" people in your posts with a "+" before their name. Just as Twitter (and subsequently Facebook) did with the "@".

Now, social networking sites have evolved over the past few years. I remember when Myspace and Xanga were the big deal, but nobody really paid attention unless they were in middle school. Then Facebook came along and restructured that same concept for the slightly older crowd. Now, however, social networking is no longer just a petty, self-absorbed forum on which to tell your friends what you're having for lunch, and where, and with whom, and a picture of it. I mean, well, it's also that, BUT it has become a legitimate, integral part of our society. For every Junior High School student posting song lyrics about teen drama and angst, there are legitimate businesses, charitable communities, sports teams, political organizations, video blogs, and easily-accessible celebrities. Facebook and YouTube have, I believe, played the most fundamental roles in this reshaping of how we network. YouTube videos and Facebook pages have become a legitimate medium for news, campaigning, and business networking. Facebook offers the option of making a page for your business at no cost. This provides advertising outreach to every user of the site who happens to stumble upon it. YouTube has become a place for businesses to purchase advertising time prior to videos in order to reach audiences who have reduced or abandoned television, in favor of more web-based entertainment or news. Even websites that were not originally designed as social networking sites have begun to take on some of its elements. Yahoo! has recently introduced a new feature for instantly sharing photos and publicly posted messages with all of your contacts on a social forum, and websites like StumbleUpon encourage you to create contacts with others and share your discoveries with them.

It seems strange for those of us who remember saying "Who cares? It's just Facebook." to think that potential employers have now hired entire departments of people whose only job is to screen the social networking histories of applicants with the same gravity with which they would perform a criminal background check. Or to realize that in the hustle and bustle of our increasingly busy days, a majority (if not all) of our social interactions happen on a screen. We are so desperate to stay connected with such demands on our time that smart phones are improving almost weekly to provide a more user-friendly interface with which to carry our social and professional lives around in our pockets.

Our society has shifted so much into a virtual world that now, I've noticed, starting with Google+, more and more privacy features are being introduced. We began social networking, despite its very nature, with a certain degree of anonymity. We were connected with whom we chose, just friends with our friends, and we felt free to blurt out every thought to share with the people who "got us" under the protective veil of the internet. Insecurities and inhibitions that kept us quiet in the real world dissolved. Photo tagging began, and our friends made plans to get together with the specific intention of taking photos to tag their friends in. Picture phones and compact digital cameras became constant companions to social networkers. Then parents, grandparents, and teachers got the hang of it, the younger generations became professionals, businesses began advertising their products and screening potential employees, all of our media websites began linking up with each other and offering to find our contacts from email and other website lists, our search results and listed interests began popping up verbatim in the banner ads on the sides of our screens, and that freedom to say whatever we wanted with impunity was banished to the mildewed comment sections of a few special interest sites, and bathroom stall graffiti. Social media has, for lack of a better word, infiltrated every aspect of our lives. Social, romantic, professional, academic; there are instant notifications for breaking news stories and every hobby, interest, and school of thought is represented in some form of online community. Recently, hanging on to the idea of being connected while retaining privacy or anonymity seems almost a bit naive. Though privacy features are being increased, soon social networks and media will offer us no more privacy or freedom than the physical realm, and no less pressure to adapt our behavior and profile settings accordingly.

Marshall McLuhan wrote about human beings creating and using technology as a necessary extension of our bodies in order to maintain equilibrium with our physical environment, such as wearing clothing and building shelters to protect us from the elements and give us privacy. Now that this tangible equilibrium has been reached (or can be with relative ease) in many modern societies, we are instead focusing on a virtual environment and inventing, by the same exact process, virtual tools and extensions needed to cope with it. Social networking may someday replace most or all of our face-to-face interaction and society, we may be a generation away from putting on a pair of goggles and living our lives in a world that is entirely virtual. Whatever the progression, one thing is for sure, the World Wide Web is vastly extending our World Wide World.

This Is Your Brain on Ads

Well, readers, I've probably mentioned before that I'm a huge nerd, and this post is about to bring it home. Because today, my lovelies, we will be talking about consumer manipulation through brain function.

Remember that commercial for the topical headache product that featured one woman who appeared to be really happy to be rubbing her child's glue stick on her forehead for 30 seconds? Remember how annoying it was?

  

Just in case.

Well, I was convinced for the longest time that this was the most ineffective advertising strategy in the history of consumerism. However, some recent research and consideration about the function of the human brain has encouraged me to rethink this opinion. Turns out I was wrong! Repetitive slogans, images, jingles and even repeated commercials are effective because the part of the brain that is responsible for repetitive tasks and behaviors and the part of the brain that controls analytical decision making can't seem to operate very well at the same time. One of these faculties will take over while the other pants pathetically in the background. Theories exist stating that this is why professional athletes "choke" when shooting free throws and kicking field goals during big games. The anxiety throws the analytical part of their brain into high gear and even though they've been kicking a ball for years, the simple, repetitive task becomes almost impossible. This is the same reason why it's difficult to give someone detailed directions to a place that you drive to every single day, and why I can operate a cash register just fine unless my boss is watching me. The same is true for the reverse, when you are being barraged with the same repeated phrase over and over, it's difficult for your brain to receive that information while analyzing it and making a decision. So when advertisers use this strategy, they are effectively temporarily blocking the brain function that analyzes information, while stimulating the part of your brain that urges you to apply HeadOn directly to your forehead...and not just because the commercial gives you a headache.

Abstract Ads-tract: Are creative commercials still persuasive?

This is a question that's been at the back of my mind for a few years now, and it has just recently come to the forefront. With the increase in control that consumers have over their media exposure, advertisers have been looking for ways to make their campaigns more intriguing and entertaining in an effort to reach their target audience without being skipped over by the DVR or the TiVo.

Some ads have opted to produce campaigns that are funny, clever, entertaining and feature the product they're selling. But I often wonder in this case, when watching television with friends and someone says "I love that commercial!" Have funny ads gone too far? Are they turning themselves into miniature sitcoms, selling their ads and not their product? My favorite example of this is the Miller Lite campaign. While a little annoying sometimes, I usually find them pretty amusing. I'm not a fan of Miller Lite, but I'll sit through one of their commercials to the punchline for the sake of entertainment. I feel that these types of campaigns are missing something. Yes, they are accomplishing one goal, convincing the consumer to view the entirety of the advertisement. But are they neglecting the promotion of their product, in order to focus on the promotion of their promotion?

On a related note, there are ads out there right now that are trying something a little unorthodox. Their images are abstract, sometimes seemingly unrelated to their product or service, but are meant to intrigue the viewer to the point that they stick around just to see what all the insanity is about. Like the Las Vegas Cosmopolitan.

Their slogan "Just the right amount of wrong." Is very interesting, especially to the target audience. In a way, I think that these ads in which there are odd things happening are more effective persuasions than the creative or clever punchline of a joke.

Mucus Babies. Intruders or Victims?

Oh boy, so I haven't written in quite a while. Sorry about that!

Today I'd like to throw my hat into the extraordinarily outdated ring and talk about the long-running Mucinex campaign. As you probably know, Mucinex is an over-the-counter expectorant that loosens and thins mucus to help clear lungs and sinuses during illness or allergies. The ads have featured coughing human characters, and animated, anthropomorphic phlegm people who "live" in lungs. Most of these humanized loogies are depicted as overweight, ugly, sweaty, free-loading, gruff-voiced men and women being evicted from their respiratory-organ-shaped apartments by way of forceful cough. I find this to be a totally satisfactory way to advertise a product, apparently so does everyone else because these have been running for a few years now.

Where it started to confuse me, was when they came out with Mucinex for Kids. They were fast melt packets flavored cherry and grape and all-around a good idea. However, the ads feature the same mucus monsters, except now they are children. These phlegm babies are still fat, slovenly-looking and obnoxious...but they are depicted in the dynamic of a family, living comfortably in a lung house together. In my eyes, I sort of sympathized with the little mucus children being forced from their happy home. Obviously, the fictional plight of anthropomorphic sputum wouldn't keep me from properly medicating my own child. But I think that using the same intruder-looking adult mucus people instead of the vulnerable image of children being victimized and made homeless, or even just showing more of the miserable, coughing human child would have gotten the message across more effectively. "Fat mucus is in your child's lungs. It is unhealthy. Remove it."

I would love to hear more about everyones' opinions about this. What to you think? Should they have introduced the loogie children? Or should they have used the grown up freeloader mucus men?

Domino's

Okay, so I have already missed a day, sorry. However, today I would like to present my inner debate about Domino's Pizza and their "We fixed our pizza because you told us to." campaign.

On one hand, I LOVED the idea of Domino's Turnaround campaign when it first started out sometime last year. It publicized the company's focus groups, they accepted responsibility for making junk pizzas and they not only changed the recipe, but they started showing up at the homes and jobs of the focus group members who had the most negative comments and surprising them with the new pizza. (Which I must say has improved greatly. Yum!) I thought this was a great way to incorporate customer satisfaction into their advertising and show that they were listening to what their customers had to say. I loved the idea of the Show Us Your Pizza photo contest held by Domino's, as well as the public apology ad by the CEO of Domino's for a pizza that showed up looking like it was scraped off the side of the road. All-in-all, I thought this campaign was a brilliant strategic move for the company. It made customers feel like their opinion mattered, and I'm sure that Domino's sales have shot through the roof as a result.

On the other hand...okay. You know that friend who says something quick and witty in a conversation and everyone laughs, and then they feel encouraged by the laughter and start forcing more jokes that aren't organic to the conversation? Yeah. Domino's is being THAT guy right now. The latest Domino's ads have been centered around filmed "focus groups" consisting of people who claim not to believe that Domino's puts food in their food. Really? Come on, Domino's. I was able to believe that someone said your old pizza had rubbery cardboard crust...because that was kind of true; but I refuse to subscribe to the notion that people don't believe that there are tomatoes in your sauce. So much so, in fact, that in order to prove that there are real tomatoes in your new sauce and real milk in your new cheese, you have to take the focus group to an actual tomato or dairy farm in a car with blacked out windows.

 

It might just be me, but I feel like Domino's is taking this a bit far. Focus groups and customer polls about the old Domino's pizza were pretty bad, but pretty accurate. Now that the pizza has changed in recipe and flavor for consistently about a year now, the focus groups shouldn't be outlandishly worse. That isn't the logical progression of things. There are better ways to advertise the website and the interactive map of where all your new ingredients come from. I don't buy it, Domino's. Start filming your focus groups where people say positive things about your new delicious pizza, say something along the lines of "Mission Accomplished" and move on to a new campaign before everyone gets wise and goes to Pizza Hut.

Getting To Know You: Newborn Blogger!

Okay, let's get this little confession out of the way. I HAVE NEVER BLOGGED BEFORE! However, I find myself quite often nowadays happily browsing well-organized blogs that have a defined theme. While blogs about sports, recipes, travel, education and art are abundant and stimulating, I haven't found many coherent blogs that post regularly about Advertising! So, as a passionate and interested Advertising student, my goal is to post one observation per day that relates to Advertising, Marketing, Branding, Consumer Relations and Manipulations and other things of that nature in hopes of receiving feedback and learning something new each day about my future industry. Posts will probably consist of my opinions about specific ads, things I'm learning in my classes, observations about advertising in general and questions about things I don't really understand.

I don't claim to be an authority by any stretch of the imagination, so if by some chance anyone is actually reading this and you have legitimate knowledge or insight into something I'm just noticing (probably for the first time) post it in the comments! I'll do my best to cite my sources in an easily accessible format. Please, if possible, do the same! My plan is to treat the extensive blogging community as an educational resource that, in my case, has gone far too long untapped.

In the interest of actually introducing myself, I suppose I should probably do that. Ahem. My name is Alyssa. I am (technically) a senior year Advertising student at an undisclosed University in Pennsylvania. I'm currently also double minoring in African History and German Language. I'm fairly loyal to a few brands and I might occasionally allude to them, but please don't hesitate to recommend things. I'm interested in knowing a little about everything, so I often get distracted in my education. Some see this as a weakness, but I believe that it has ultimately made me more open-minded and well-rounded. I'm fairly nerdy. I enjoy things like music, herbal tea, sports, baking, reading, beer, technology, food, photography, and homework (really). I like to make bad jokes and puns pretty often, so if you find them cheesy...well...sorry. I also use a lot of commas. I'm not sure if that annoys other people or not, but my English teachers were just always really aggressive about the correct use of commas.

So, in honor of my very first post, let's all agree to act like adults, check our facts, express our opinions kindly, cite our sources, and keep our minds open!

[This might go without saying, but, if you, the reader, find something I post to be unpleasant, offensive, or just downright wrong, please try not to take it personally. Feel free to let me know in a calm, rational way. I may not be a seasoned blogger, but I am certainly no stranger to the dreaded comment section. While I'm not very easily offended, I'm hoping we can all present our disagreements in a way that doesn't try to hurt anyone's feelings, you know, like grown-ups. If comments start to appear that contain (excessive) profanity, spam, insults, threats, or anything I consider to be intrusive, offensive, or mean-spirited, your post will be deleted and you will be reported.]